Currently, medical professionals frequently utilize conventional answering services to handle calls received from patients, particularly, those received after-hours. In fact, as the volume of calls increases, answering service systems have become necessary for doctors, practitioners, and other medical professionals who want to provide their patients with the optimal care and service both during and after business hours. However, such conventional answering services provide basic support such as operators answering patient calls on behalf of the doctor or other medical professionals, taking messages on their behalf, forwarding the calls to the medical professionals or paging the medical professionals in cases of emergencies. These existing services are ancient and add no value to the health care providers. The services merely function to receive the patient's call and act as a go between to contact the medical professional. The patient calling these conventional answering services can only provide their contact information and wait for a response from the medical professional. Also, the medical professional does not have access to the patient's health data when he or she is speaking to the patient seeking medical advice. Furthermore, the conversation between the patient and the medical professional during the call can be billable events, however, the health care providers don't typically capture such events since there is no detailed record or transcript of the calls.
Thus there is a need for an improved system and method to overcome the deficiencies of the conventional answering services and provide the many services that are needed in the health care industry in order to receive and manage patient communication to the health care providers.